Wicked Local Cambridge reports on MIT's plans for new residences and retail space on what are now parking lots; will that be enough to transform the soulless collection of buildings into a neighborhood?

Oliver Smoot, the man who became a unit of measurement, was back in town today to serve as grand marshal of the 100th anniversary of MIT's moving day - the celebration of the school's moving from the Back Bay to Cambridge.

The New York Times reports a team of scientists, including Rainer Weiss of MIT have confirmed the presence of gravitational waves, something Einstein predicted in 1915, but which have never before been detected.

Two detectors, each 2.5 miles long and 1,900 miles apart, detected waves from the collision of two black holes about 1.2 billion years ago, almost as soon as they were turned on for testing, the Times reports.

MIT says Toshiba owes it at least that much in royalties for the right to make digital TVs, video players and home-theater systems based on patents it holds.

In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, MIT says that Toshiba stopped making agreed upon royalty payments in 2011 for patented work by MIT researchers on several key digital-TV standards, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. Read more.

The Tech reports on efforts to rename the title of people who oversee student residences at MIT:

After speaking with students, Essigmann found that "Head of House" was a popular choice, often due to â€œaffection for Harry Potter and Hogwarts." ...

The survey included "House Parent" (which some students considered infantilizing) and "House Maven" (which some students considered silly and subtly feminine). "Dumbledore" stood out as a popular write-in among responses ..."

Key to the research is alginate, a substance derived from seaweed that blocks the immune system from attacking the container for the new cells as "foreign" without the need for expensive and risky immune suppressing drugs. Read more.

Minsky viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated in a computer - which would teach us, in turn, to better understand the human brain and higher-level mental functions: How might we endow machines with common sense - the knowledge humans acquire every day through experience? How, for example, do we teach a sophisticated computer that to drag an object on a string, you need to pull, not push - a concept easily mastered by a two-year-old child?